Welcome to Dorothy. There’s No Place Like Home.

Migration and mobility: the question of childhood in Chinese and European cinema since 1945 was originally a 2011-2015, 2016-2018 ARC Future Fellowship research project led by Professor Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, as Future Fellow and Professor of Comparative Film and Cultural Studies, University of New South Wales. It has become known fondly as ‘The Dorothy Project’, after perhaps the most quintessential cinematic child-traveller, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Stephi is now Distinguished Professor of Film at the University of Lincoln and Research Director at the Centre for Culture and Creativity She is continuing work on migration, childhood, refugees and cinema, and welcomes contact on these matters.

The first monograph of the project, There’s No Place Like Home: The Migrant Child in World Cinema, was published by I B Tauris (Bloomsbury) in 2018. The book won a 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award. ‘ a deeply felt, compassionate, necessary book’ (CHOICE citation.)

“The Wizard of Oz brought many now-iconic tropes into popular culture: the yellow brick road, ruby slippers and Oz. But this book begins with Dorothy and her legacy as an archetypal touchstone in cinema for the child journeying far from home. In There’s No Place Like Home, displaced or placeless children, and the idea of childhood itself, provide pathways to examine migration and cosmopolitanism in films such as Le Ballon Rouge,Diamonds of the Night, Rabbit Proof Fence and Little Moth. Surveying fictional and documentary film from the post-war years until today, the author shows how the child is a guide to themes of place, self and being in world cinema.”

Other publications from the project:

Although most of the publications from the project link directly to the child migrant onscreen, there has been a developing interest in Refugee Film-making that has come both from the work of children and from access to the work of filmmakers in Australia, Manus, Europe. As these new publications come online we will share them here.